For just pennies a day, you can save a Trent Reznor from being
uncomfortable on MTV. The Save the NIN fund pays for things Trent Reznors need,
like extra keyboards to smash, 10-gallon drums of corn starch, and an announcer
who can pronounce the name of his band without calling it "Nine Inch
SNAILS."

At first I ruled against including media in these posts, because in this day
and age anybody who wants to find that stuff can do so. However, I've realized
that the act of choosing what's relevant can be a part of the writing process.
Now, you can watch all of them, watch some of them, or ignore them completely
if you have no use for them.

First, let me get something out of the way that I would have posted in Part
1 if I'd been including video then:

Watch out for the guy in the back

Pre-NIN Trent Reznor, as a part of another band. I love how everyone
else looks seriously '80s, and young Trent appears to be dressed for 1997. God
bless the '80s; God bless Youtube.

Witness Protection: Speaking Truth to NiNnies

I may need to take an assumed name and hide myself; learn to blend into the
shadows, like a ninja. There may be no amount of preparation possible to keep
me safe; I am about to write some things about The Fragile
that are not entirely complimentary. NIN fans the world over will want
my head to hang on their mantelpiece.

"That was the girl who dared criticized The Fragile, we
caught up with her eventually. She thought she was so clever, hiding in that
big pile of comic books and Tori Amos CDs, but the smell of coffee and Orbit
gum gave her away. Now, you can see her head over there, next to my mint copy
of the Into the Void single autographed by Trent Reznor, or at least
someone who looks a lot like him. It might have been that guy from Lost,
actually."

Nineteen Ninety Nine

There are a couple of general guidelines for life, some well-recognized and
some less so. There's Benjamin Franklin's famous assertion that the only
certainties are death and taxes, the maxim do unto others as you would have
them do unto you, and the fact that you should never let Trent pick the
singles.

I was ecstatic the day I saw the single The Day the World Went Away
at the record store (hey, remember those?), the first single off of The
Fragile, NIN's long-awaited fourth album. Finally, a new song from
NIN! And a real single, off a real album, not a joke remix EP like The
Perfect Drug (no offense to The Perfect Drug!) Yippie-kiyaay!
Moments after listening to the song, my excitement morphed into confusion, and
finally intense disappointment. Months later, when The Fragile
hit the shelves, I bought it dutifully, but without much enthusiasm; my faith
in NIN had been shattered. I remember lining up at my local Sam Goody to buy
the album, but I was also purchasing the newly released VHS subtitled editions
of the Sailor Moon movies, and I was much more excited about the anime at that
time. NIN put out a hugely experimental, double CD? That's nice. I used to
really like them. I'll listen to it later, Sailor Venus awaits.

Am I the only one who makes this connection?

It's not that TDTWWA is a bad song; on the contrary, it's grown on
me tremendously in the intervening decade. I especially like the acoustic
version released as a part of the And All That Could Have Been
package several years later. But it's like the Waiting for
Godot of rock singles. There's nothing wrong with Waiting for
Godot, it's brilliant in fact, but can you imagine taking someone to
see Beckett's existentialist lament when they were expecting something more
along the lines of Cats? I was expecting a Closer
(which I had learned to appreciate by that point), or a Head Like a
Hole, and instead I got a song that wasn't single material, but was one of
those quiet pieces that you ignore on first listen, but only grow on you much
later after you've tired of the catchier tracks. If you need a time machine to
properly enjoy your single the day you buy it, there's something terribly,
terribly wrong. It was a bait and switch of modest, but significant,
proportions.

Reznor later said that he wasn't trying to commit career suicide with
The Fragile, but that's pretty close to what happened. Whether
it was the intention or not, singles like TDTWWA and later, We're
In This Together (which was musically innovative, but possibly the
whiniest, most melodramatic song NIN has ever put out) sent a clear message to
the throngs of rock fans who rallied around Closer as a party anthem;
This is not mainstream music. This is ARTISTIC music, do you hear me? NIN is an
art band. Go away, millions of fans.

Introduced by Johnny Depp, no less

NIN performing at the 1999. MTV Video Music Awards. I don't think that
this one of their better performances of this song, but I chalk that up to MTV
besmirching everything it touches. I want to know what it is Robin did that was
so funny it made Trent laugh in the middle of the song.

Oh, and isn't it a shame that we're ten years too early for Kanye West
here? I would love to see what happened if he interrupted Nine Inch Nails
instead of a willowy folk singer girl. I've seen Trent get violent with that
mic stand....

Into the Void of Certainty

The highest compliment I can pay to The Fragile is that,
even a decade later, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It's the only NIN
album that sounds pretentious to me; I can almost hear Reznor's desperation to
out-Spiral himself, prove that the novelty of The Downward
Spiral was not a fluke. Tracks like The Great Below, while
beautifully arranged and loaded with potential, seem to fall slightly flat,
lyrically derivative and lacking the sincerity of NIN's earlier work.
Throughout the album, the music is on a level above the lyrics and the vocals;
the pretty, playful Into the Void, one of the album's most
original compositions, is somewhat let down by Reznor's vocals-- god forbid a
song on the album merely be whimsical, there needs to be some self-hatred in
there! Some of the darker tracks, like No You Don't and
Where is Everybody, are both depressing and forgettable; well,
at least you'll forget how depressed you were.

And yet, no matter how many disparaging things I find to say about it, there
are plenty of moments when it all comes together. Somewhat
Damaged is a fantastic opening track; it is also dark and depressing,
but the constantly building intensity is so effective that you can't help but
revel in that darkness, which is what the best metal does. The primarily
instrumental tracks are of course free from the lyrical malaise of the rest of
the album, and they truly shine. Even when I was too disappointed with
The Fragile overall to truly appreciate it on its own merits,
Just Like You Imagined still struck me as one of the most beautiful
pieces of music I'd ever head; I used it as the soundtrack to an animation I
made during my senior year of high school. The Way Out is Through is
just as evocative as the title would suggest, almost a thesis statement for the
album. La Mer, largely a piano piece featuring some French lyrics by a
female vocalist, is quietly mesmerizing. On a few songs, primarily the title
track and Even Deeper, Reznor gives a quieter, more nuanced vocal
performance that would become characteristic of later albums. The flip side of
being pretentious is that, if you're aiming for high artistry, sometimes you
actually reach it, and the Fragile is a long double album-- there are a lot of
mediocre tracks, but there are a lot of winners too, and the winners are forces
to be reckoned with. The constant presence of stringed instruments, as opposed
to the mostly electronic fare of The Downward Spiral, adds a feeling of warmth
to the album that hasn't been equaled on any NIN release before or since;
something about it reminds you of a rainforest.

NIN learning how to play JLYI live (it's possible?)

Despite some of the band members screwing up the vocal part a little bit
in rehearsal, I like this version of the song a lot.

I guess the easiest way to sum up the album is that it's massively flawed,
but also massively beautiful. If it's a failure, it's only so in the sense that
you have to wonder what the album would have been if Reznor had been in a
better place emotionally when he made it-- The Downward Spiral
casts too large a shadow on it. It really only fails in its inability to make
good on immense potential. It's a sacred cow for NIN fans because that was the
album that separated the men from the boys and the women from the groupies; if
you stopped being a huge fan of NIN during The Fragile era,
it's because you were a fair-weather fan and never understood what NIN was
about musically anyway. I like to think that, even though my NIN fandom waned
during that era, it's not because I didn't understand NIN. I think I understood
NIN well enough to understand that the album could have been so much more.

Sales Falling Apart

If I'm ambivalent about The Fragile even now, I've got
nothing on the critical response to the album, which over time has proved to be
entirely nonsensical. At the time of its release, numerous publications like
USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Alternative Press, and Spin Magazine heaped
lavish praise upon the album. However, when The Fragile did
not sell to expectations, retroactively many music critics apparently decided
that not only was it not that good, but despite what they may have said before,
they never actually liked it that much in the first place. In the press about
2005's With Teeth, a lot of critics addressed it as a comeback
album, as if The Fragile were a disgrace that required coming
back from. Now, ten years later and in the light of NIN's recent critical
success with albums like Year Zero and The
Slip, suddenly everyone remembers that The Fragile
was amazingly ahead of its time. Make up your goddamned minds, people.

For a while people liked to refer to The Fragile as a
commercial failure, but that's a slight that I haven't heard much these days; I
think in light of what's happened to the music industry in recent years, the
double-platinum sales of The Fragile are looking better and
better. At the time though, the fact that The Fragile sold
less than expected and did not produce any radio hits on a par with
Closer, or even anything close to that, seemed to signal the end of
NIN as a powerful force in rock. Furthermore, the remix album Things
Falling Apart was bland, as remix albums go.

And All that Could Have Been

Nine Inch Nails 'La Mer' ((Live from AATCHB))

In 2002, NIN released a live CD and DVD. At the time, the title struck me as
disturbingly self-lacerating; just imagine all that could have been, if
The Fragile had been better and NIN shows were still
completely sold out like they were in the good old days. Actually, the title
refers to a bonus track of the same name off of the Still
album, which was included as a bonus with the deluxe version of
AATCHB. While the live album was pretty much what you would
expect, Still was a surprise. Including several new songs
(primarily instrumentals) and acoustic remakes of earlier songs, the bonus disc
was the star of the package. In theory, there was a six-year gap between
The Fragile and 2005's With Teeth, but a lot
of NIN fans didn't feel that way; Still felt like an album
unto itself.

Nine Inch Nails - Gone, Still.

It also began a trend which would continue throughout the rest of NIN's
existence up to the present; grandmas and grandpas saying "I like this music,
who is it?" and experiencing extreme confusion when confronted with the
answer.

Personally I'm not that fond of AATCHB itself-- the lyrics suffer
from Fragile-Era melodrama. But the instrumentals are great, and the acoustic
version of The Becoming proves that, despite everything that should
make it impossible, NIN can make heavy metal with a grand piano. I think it's
safe to say that that's a rare skill.

Metal +Grand Piano: Because it was there

What are you people doing? Is this safe? Does Elton John know what
you've done with his piano? That poor bastard.

Next on NIN: The Series (or whatever it is that I'm doing), the With
Teeth and Year Zero eras. I was going to post the
video for The Hand that Feeds to get you all revved up for
With Teeth, but there's been a lot of Trent Reznor in this
entry, hasn't there? Yeah, I think so too. NIN is about more than just the
front man, afterall. So instead, please enjoy this totally Reznor-Free version
of The Hand that Feeds.

Last Tuesday night I watched "Obama's War", PBS Frontline's
hour-long documentary about the war in Afghanistan. The main value of the
documentary was that it showed a lot of things that you don't see on other
broadcasts- and I'm not referring to the violence. Little things, like a marine
trying to communicate with a group of Afghan villagers and running into
translation issues, or the troops lazing around sans gear in the 120 degree
heat of an abandoned school, gave you a sense of what it must really be like to
be there. Now, I'm sure soldiers would laugh at the idea that someone like me
'understands' what it's like to be there (I don't profess to know that much)
but for the first time, I felt like I had gotten at least an inkling of what it
must really be like there, aside from the explosions and the television vistas
of oceans upon oceans of sand.

If I took one thing away from the program overall, it was that the war in
Afghanistan is not only different from the war in Iraq; it's like the war in
Iraq through an insane funhouse mirror, where everything is similar on multiple
levels but different in every way that truly matters. "Yeah, they're asking for
more troops in Afghanistan, but this time they have an actual PLAN for what to
do with those troops. This may seem like a pre-emptive war, because we're
trying to sort out Afghanistan in order to avoid future terror attacks, but
it's actually not pre-emptive because it's a continuation of the same war we
started eight years ago- the one that was actually in direct response to an
attack. Their current plan is based on winning the trust of the Afghan people
through kindness and respect, which would probably work were it not for the
fact that the Afghan people have been treated so arbitrarily over the course of
the war, not to mention the last several decades, that they don't believe it
when the troops say they're there to help. Instead of distracting us from a
more important subject, this war is also a shadow-war with our ally Pakistan,
who are peaceful on the surface but have been supporting the Taliban all this
time, and one way or another, we are going to have to set a precedent for how
military powers will deal with this kind of warfare, which bypasses diplomacy
or even accountability, by doing the dirty work through faceless terror
organizations," and so on.

I believe that General McChrystal is right in requesting more troops in
order to strengthen the counter-insurgency, but then I hear myself thinking
'more troops' and 'Middle East' and I want to slap myself. I know it's
different, but the failures of the Iraq war instigated a kind of paradigm shift
in how most people in the US think about war: We don't want to go into it
half-assed ever again. In fact, we don't even want to go into it
three-quarters, seven-eights-assed ever again. It would take the emergence of
swastika-emblazoned ,WWII-era Nazi's en masse from a time machine to convince
many Americans that it's worth sending any troops into any war EVER AGAIN. "Get
the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan" has become a mantra, and many people
don't want to acknowledge the fact that those are two different things; it just
makes everything so painfully complicated.

For example, there's a lot of talk of 'nation-building' in Afghanistan, and
it was basically glossed over in Tuesday's documentary when one diplomat said
"This is Nation RE-building; there is already a Nation there." Unless you're
looking at it from a Poli-Sci perspective, that seems like meaningless
semantics, but it's critically important. When all these people say
Nation-building, what they really mean is State-building; Nation building is
virtually impossible. The sense of shared history and destiny that forms a
Nation cannot be forced; the machinery of the state that complements that
Nation is another story. It's extremely difficult to build a state without a
nation, and that's the main problem in Iraq; the place is made up of several
distinct nations who, for the most part, would be just as happy never to see
each other ever again. In Afghanistan, while the organization is primarily
tribal and local, the major conflicts in their history have not been along
ethnic lines, at least in recent decades. Left to their own devices, the Afghan
people instituted a secular, progressive government in the 1970's, which lasted
until the Soviet Invasion. Recent history attests that they don't have a
problem with the idea of being united under one government, and a secular one
at that; they just wish their current government wasn't corrupt to the point of
uselessness. In other words, we're not trying to force something on them that
they have no interest in.

Forget Religion

Another aspect of the situation that is difficult to understand is the role
of religion, although that's really more about the concept of religion as an
organizational tool than actual religious belief; another thing that "Obama's
War" did was reinforced my opinion that all of these conflicts are 99% secular,
1% religious. Money, territory, power, ethnic prestige-- these are all purely
secular concerns. The holy war concept is a useful lie, because it sounds a lot
better when you say "I'm doing this because God told me to, therefore it is
RIGHT", as opposed to "I'm tired of being one of the have-nots in this society
and my peeps have hated your peeps for eons anyways, so I don't have a problem
killing you to get ahead." Whether that's a lie for the outside world or a lie
they've internalized probably depends on the individual extremist, but it
doesn't really matter. You can blame religion all you want, but the fact of the
matter is, if we somehow woke up tomorrow to a world where religion no longer
existed, people would find another pretext to fight over money, power, and
prestige. "Jihad" isn't a philosophy, it's a meme.

Frankly, any talk about 'Jihad' at this point is a complete waste of time,
because what terrorists groups are doing has virtually no relationship with
anything in Islam. Terrorists want to hide behind the belief that there
actually is some sort of holy war going on here, and every time we talk about
their 'Jihad', we're cooperating with them. If there's anything resembling a
true Jihad going on, it's on the part of Muslims who are fighting to stop their
practical, egalitarian belief system from being defiled by all of this.

If you still don't believe that religion isn't really at the heart of any of
this, consider this: the true believer, who takes every word of their text
literally, has no reason to hurt you in this life; he BELIEVES that you will
burn in hell. Feeling the need to shoot you is a sign of true spiritual
insecurity, and it's downright embarrassing.

The Solution, such as it is

The really frustrating part for me is that there actually is a clear
solution; it's just politically unfeasible. Unfeasible to the point where I
wonder if we wouldn't be better off packing off and going home, regardless of
the fact that everything will only deteriorate further, and who knows what
consequences will stem out of that.

In the documentary, the American troops stationed themselves near a market
in order to get closer to the Afghan people; afraid of being shot by the
Taliban, the civilians abandoned that market and went to shop at a different
one, miles away. The Marines then had the unenviable task of trying to convince
the villagers, through poor interpreters, to come back to the market. The
Afghan people don't believe that the soldiers can protect them from the
Taliban, and why should they? Soldiers are dying; the marines don't have
sufficient resources to thoroughly protect themselves, let alone anyone else.
Forget about forging long-term trust and proving that the Americans are there
for the duration this time: the Afghans don't have good reason to trust the
Americans when they say "We will protect you from getting shot tomorrow."

In order to win true, deserved trust from the Afghan people, the troops have
to be able to say "We will protect you", and make it look like a no-brainer; if
the US presence were so overwhelming that you couldn't through a rock in
Afghanistan without hitting an armed marine, suddenly the idea of the soldiers
protecting the populace would have to be taken seriously. If the US presence
were such that the idea of a Taliban attack was ludicrous, because, with all
the marines around, it would be unclear whether the Taliban would have a
place to stand, we would not have to convince the Afghans of our
commitment to their safety; it would be palpable, so demonstrably true that
there would be no question. With that level of safety, there would be greater
cooperation in areas that will ensure future success- training large numbers of
Americans to speak the local languages, supporting the next generation of
Afghan artists and musicians who will promote and expand the traditional
culture and help build Afghan pride and solidarity, building schools, etc. The
impenetrable military shield would create a venue where all the things which
would truly build Afghanistan- most of which are non-military, and would
require non-military actors- would be possible on a grand scale.

If we followed this strategy, we could create a kind of sister-country in
Afghanistan, helping them to follow up on the progressive path they started on
in the 1970's, before the cold war threw everything off track and led to the
post-war troubles that spawned the Taliban. In the new Afghanistan, the Taliban
would be unwelcome; they could try to survive through their cooperation with
Pakistan, however I don't see how that could work- the Pakistani government has
been nothing if not pragmatic. If supporting the Taliban in resisting the US
would seem like a tremendous resource drain for them (which it would be, if the
US presence was on the scale that I am talking about), does anyone really doubt
that Pakistan would drop them like a hot potato? There has been much talk about
coercing Pakistan to be cooperative; in my view, we could bypass that entirely.
Just make supporting the Taliban a big enough pain in the ass for them to deal
with that it's not worth it to them anymore, and suddenly we're on the same
side.

The obvious problem here is that, in addition to the issue of getting a
war-wearied American populace to commit to a military objective on this scale
(which is probably a deal-breaker in and of itself), I don't know if the
numbers I'm envisioning here are even possible without a draft. Maybe they
would have been possible had the Iraq war not so thoroughly exhausted the
American military, but as of right now I doubt it. Of course, then I see myself
typing words like "draft", and I want to slap myself again. It's so bizarre; I
don't like the idea of large-scale military engagements one iota, but given
that this situation has already been created, committed to, and sacrificed for,
we can either do what it takes to win- an effort that will, at least in the
short term, seem like madness, and anachronistic madness at that ('didn't we
learn anything from Vietnam?' as many will say with even greater didactic
frequency')- or continue to play a waiting game, hoping that we'll get lucky
and things will somehow take a turn for the better of their own accord. I'm
afraid that without a much more significant commitment, the level of
involvement we have in Afghanistan now will do nothing except stall the
inevitable, if even that. If we send more troops, that means more Americans
sending their children off, possibly to die, on a premise that no one professes
to truly understand; if we don't, those that have died so far will have done so
for nothing, and will continue to do so in dribs and drabs until we eventually
slink away with our tail between our legs, after another decade or two of
stalling, while the terrorist nirvana that Afghanistan will have become plots
more heinous crimes against humanity.

There is no way out of this that isn't difficult and ugly; if I seem to
favor the higher-risk, go-for-broke approach, it's because that at least in
theory, that strategy could eventually create another strong, secular ally in
the region- almost like a second Israel, albeit with very different fashion and
cuisine. And if we set a precedent of rehabilitating failed states, it will
make it difficult for terrorist organizations to get a firm foothold anywhere-
could they really take advantage of the power vacuum in Country X, if in all
likelihood the US (or maybe even China) could step in at any moment? Despite
how ludicrously expensive the whole thing may sound, making a habit of turning
terrorist hotbeds into proper states means we'll be dealing with proper states
rather than terrorist hotbeds; and unlike terrorist hotbeds, dealing with
states is something America traditionally doesn't suck at.

We've been afraid of the loud bang of nuclear MAD, World War III, for a long
time. Lately, it looks increasingly like there might not be any bang, but a
series of whimpers so cacophonous they end up being louder in the end. The WWII
metaphors of the Bush Administration, used to try to justify the War in Iraq,
annoyed the hell out of me, but as with so many things, maybe they were
partially right- even more unforgivable than being flat out wrong, which we
could just ignore. You cannot apply the rules of WWII to today- the paradigms
have changed. For one thing, it's a lot harder to tell when you've won. But one
thing remains the same; if what you're fighting is truly a World War, you have
to commit.

I know; it's easy to say. "If that's what you think, why don't YOU go to
Afghanistan, missy?" Well, maybe I will- it's possible they might need English
majors there at some point. They certainly don't have much of a use for us
anywhere else.

Little-known fact: The video for The Perfect Drug was created for the
sole purpose of giving bloggers cool screenshots to work with. True
story.

As luck would have it, my NIN fandom was at its height during the period
where NIN could not be bothered to release a damn thing; maybe it was one of
those absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder sorts of deals.

There was a five-year gap between the release of The Downward
Spiral in 1994 and The Fragile in 1999 (technically,
Further Down the Spiral was released in 1995, however that
contained remixes of TDS tracks done by other artists than
NIN, meaning that calling it a NIN album is a bit of a reach.) That's a long
wait between albums, especially in an industry where the average shelf life of
a band is only a few years to begin with.

At the time, Trent Reznor was distracted by outside projects; scoring the
David Lynch film Lost Highway being one, and an ill-fated
collaboration with Tool frontman Maynard James Keener another. While Reznor
received accolades for his work on Lynch's film, the Reznor-MJK project,
tentatively titled Tapeworm, is credited with the creation of only one
commercially-released track. The idea of a NIN/Tool crossover however has
proved so appealing to so many fans that Reznor claims that he has now spent
more time answering questions about Tapeworm after the fact than he and Maynard
ever spent working on it. For hard rock fans, it seems Tapeworm will forever be
'the one that got away', a kind of holy relic of 90's rock.

If it was a sparse time for NIN, it was also a confusing one. The one new
song NIN released during the era, The Perfect Drug, was credited to
NIN; however, other short instrumentals on the Lost Highway album were
credited to Trent Reznor individually. Was Trent branching out as a solo
artist, at least in the realm of film? Was NIN becoming a truly collaborative
act, necessitating the distinction between the band and Reznor himself? Would
any of this matter whatsoever unless any of the above parties got down to
business and recorded the next stupid album already?

Reznor has admitted in recent years that the gap between albums was largely
due to fear; after the tremendous critical and commercial success of
The Downward Spiral, he was afraid that he was destined to be
called a has-been pretty much regardless of what he did next. Unfortunately,
though his procrastination may not have helped matters any, his fears proved to
be well-founded: it took an album or two for people to accept that NIN would
not, could not, make the The Downward Spiral again (not on a
boat, not on a train, not with a pig, not in a wig, not in New Orleans, not
with a walrus. Sorry.) Nevertheless, in 1997 we did get to hear The Perfect
Drug-- like an oasis in a desert with no NIN, which come to think of it would
be like most deserts, but c'est la vie.

The Perfect Video

If the Closer video was a worthy addition to the song, the The
Perfect Drug video took the "Music video that actually has a legitimate
artistic reason to exist" concept to a higher level: the video is better than
the song. In one sense, the video justifies the song.

It might seem obnoxiously pseudo-intellectual to presume that a song needs
justification to exist, and I suppose it is, but The Perfect Drug
presents a bit of a strange case. Ostensibly written for The Lost Highway
soundtrack, only one tiny part of the song actually features in the movie- a
tiny part with no vocals, incidentally. While The Perfect Drug was
technically a single, the actual song did not appear on the commercially
released EP- only a collection of remixes, something that annoyed me
tremendously at the time (maybe it's just me, but when I buy CD single, I'd
kind of like the actual song to be on it.) While the song has many interesting
features and was nominated for the Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy Award in
1997 (one of NIN's twelve Grammy Nominations, two of which were wins), it
usually doesn't make appearances on fans' "Top 3 NIN Songs" lists. It's solid,
impressively experimental, and catchy, but lyrically a bit derivative of NIN's
previous material.

Where Mark Romanek got the idea to turn TPD into a gothic, Edward
Gorey-inspired visual feast, I'll never know. But at some point, the video
ceases to be a Nine Inch Nails product and becomes Romanek's Opus. He somehow
coached a believable performance of a distinct character out of Trent Reznor,
who had never played anyone but himself in videos (albeit with some
showmanship.) In TPD, instead of Reznor we have a haunted nobleman in
a dark Victorian estate morning the loss of either a woman, a child, or both--
it's hard to tell. More importantly, the video has the nerve to reach for
grandeur and actually captures it.

Goatees:
Should only be acceptable in this video, and POSSIBLY on Hugh Jackman. That is
all.

At first glance, it looks more like a trailer for a feature film than a
music video-- it's so fully realized that you believe there must be more there,
more than this few minutes of film accompanying this strange song, equally
soothing and cacophonous. Some people have expressed the wish that this video
be expanded upon and made into a feature film; I think that would be redundant.
It is a film; Romanek just did away with the need for things like "dialogue"
and "running time."

Next time, I get into the second half of NIN's discography with The
Fragile, Things Falling Apart, and And All
That Could Have Been. You realize that by the time I get to
Ghosts, I'll have probably have such commentary-exhaustion
that the entry will read "NIN made album with no wurds, wuz good!", but we'll
see.